"In the United States, Democratic politicians seemed to have combined two political strategies to sustain their dominant position in the left. On the one hand, they also promoted, like Canada’s liberal party, progressive policies such as the Social Security Act of 1935 and massive countercyclical programs under the New Deal. On the other hand, they bought off urban working populations through clientelistic policies. /.../

union support for a socialist alternative was patchy in the United States because the Democratic party could deliver the goods. Because democracy and universal male suffrage had preceded industrialization, the existing political parties had the organizational resources to integrate the urban working class when it formed. The Democratic party (and in some cases the Republican party too) did through the construction of urban party machines that sustained extensive clientelistic networks. Those networks cut the ground from under any socialist alternative." (s 24, 26)

Och hävdar att: "what seems certain is that any satisfactory theory about the rise of social democracy (and about the final structure of party systems across the world) must examine the fortunes of socialism in the context of the strategic choices that non-socialist parties made in the path toward full democratic institutions one hundred years ago." (s 27)

Referenser
Carles Boix, "The Rise of Social Democracy" (pdf), 2011
Gary King, A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem (Princeton University Press, 1997)

Fotnot
Facklig anslutningsgrad: "Before the turn of the 20th century, the
highest levels of trade unionization (in Britain and Denmark) stood at
around 16-18 percent of the dependent labor force. But a substantial
number of countries had unionization rates around 2 to 5 percent of the
labor force. Unionization rates grew rapidly in the 1910s and
particularly in the period of 1917-22 -- at a time of great social
agitation, unionization rates reached almost half of the work force in
Belgium and Sweden and averaged about a fourth of the labor force in
Western Europe." (s 20n)